Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Friday, June 1, 2007

In general, we think of ourselves as idealized reasoning agents. When we are making decisions, forming opinions about things, or sustaining a belief or behavior, we tend to think that some careful reasoning and attentiveness on our own part will help insure that the results are rational. We also have the view that the contents of our own minds, our motives, our reasons, and our beliefs are readily available to us, transparent, open, and incorrigible to introspection. You know your own mind better than anyone else, and you know your beliefs, your reasons, your motives, and the extent to which your decisions are reasonable.

Volumes and volumes of contemporary research in psychology and philosophy are making it clear that most, if not all of these assumptions are grossly mistaken. A recent article in New Scientist details a long list of ways in which we all make bad, irrational decisions.

Here are just a few of the highlights:People are very bad at anticipating how happy a choice will make them, or how bad the consequences of some feared negative outcome will really be. We to think that winning the lottery will make us happier than it actually will, and we tend to think that a disaster like losing a leg will be make our lives much worse than it does. Our emotions have a very strong impact on the outcomes of our decisions. For example, men who are mad will gamble much more and take bigger risks when they are angry. Confirmation bias—emphasizing or selecting evidence that supports a pet belief while neglecting evidence that would refute it—affects us dramatically and makes it very hard for us to make decisions that adequately weigh all the alternatives. To make matters worse, we estimate that confirmation bias will affect other people’s decision making much more than it affects our own. Our cognitive constitution tries to latch onto examples or data that corroborates favored views that we have already made up our minds about. The tendency is very strong and it often requires a powerful force of will to resist it and actively seek out contrary opinions, alternative explanations, and different possibilities. The full article is here:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19426021.100-top-10-ways-to-make-better-decisions.htmlNow let’s consider the God question. On the classic, old school theism model, 1a) the theist holds that a reasonable person who considers the right evidence objectively and rationally will be justified in believing that God exists, 1b) the atheist or agnostic holds that a reasonable person who considers the right evidence objectively will be justified in believing that God does not exist, or that God’s existence cannot be known respectively.2a) the theist holds that a person who considers that evidence and doesn’t conclude that God exists is being irrational.2b) the atheist holds that a person who considers all the relevant evidence and doesn’t conclude that God doesn’t exist is being irrational. The agnostic holds that it is irrational not to be agnostic from the evidence. 3) knowing whether or not you believe in God and what sort of belief that is simply a matter of introspecting your own thoughts, and 4) knowing what your reasons are for believing in God (or not) is also merely a matter of introspecting and it will be clear to you what your grounds or reasons for believing are. Today, despite many developments in what is being called post-evidentialist or post-modernist theism, probably most of the people engaged in this discussion about God either explicitly or implicitly endorse either 1a), 2a), 3) and 4), or 1b, 2b), 3) and 4). There is a lot to comment on here. But let’s focus on 3) and 4). A number of developments in experimental psychology, cognitive research, and epistemology have made it increasingly clear that 3) and 4) are mistaken. That is, there are good reasons to think that in many cases, what you believe is not actually available to introspection, and the grounds or reasons for your beliefs are either not available to introspection, or introspection is not a reliable or accurate means of determining the grounds of your belief. I’ll just sketch out a few of the more interesting cases and arguments that seem to support these conclusions. What people will report they believe, it turns out, is highly influencable by environmental factors, priming, context, and expectations. In a number of important experiments, it has been shown that when an image of something that test subjects find objectionable is flashed at them for an interval that is too short for them to be consciously aware of it (approx. less than 250 milliseconds), they will then respond differently to questions or tasks put to them than they do when they are not primed with the fast image. What this suggests is that there are cognitive gears set in motion below the conscious threshold that affect what we experience or are conscious of, but we are completely unaware of these mechanisms. It would seem to follow then, that your introspections of what you believe or what you experience are relatively late stage results of processes that occur without your control, supervision, or access. And your reports about what you believe and why you believe it may or may not align with what is really going on in your head. A couple of other examples deserve consideration. There are cases where patients, particularly some kinds of stroke victims, will report that they are in pain but there in nothing particularly unpleasant about it. They can recognize that they are experiencing pain, but it lacks the painful affect. There are also cases, now famous in the philosophy literature, of people with blind sight. They report, and insist, that they are blind. But when asked to guess, or given visual tasks that they attempt like counting objects, they will consistently offer the correct answers. And there are cases of the reverse where someone insists that they are not blind, but when given visual tasks it is clear that they cannot see anything. When asked why they didn’t succeed at the counting task or navigating around objects, they will continue to say that they can see but that they were distracted or confused, or they will make some other excuse. There is a great deal more to be said here about these case and their implications. But an important point that I want to draw out is that our common sense view about being able to know what we believe and being able to know the reasons or causes that lead us to believe it, is simply not trustworthy. Your own mind is simply not as transparent or accessible to you as you thought it was. And this point is particularly important for the question of believing in God. Most people will readily admit that the existence of God is a matter of incredible emotional, psychological, and personal importance. Even without third party neuroscience researchers to test and examine our reports about our beliefs, we all know that when it comes to God, there are powerful sub-conscious, or non-rational aspects of our cognitive constitutions at work. I’ve called this deep felt need that we have for there to be a God The Urge in previous posts. So here’s the point: since we are not very good at knowing our own minds, and since we all seem to have The Urge, it stands to reason that the rationality of religious beliefs are prima facie suspect. And they should be suspicious to you even if you have thought hard about it and it still seems to you that you have good reasons for believing and that those reasons are why you believe. Strange things happen in the recesses of the human mind/brain. And a lot of very careful research and arguments are starting to suggest that there is an evolutionary, biological foundation of religious belief. I would also submit that the near universal subscription across cultures and across time to beliefs about some sort of afterlife, some sort of higher, supernatural power, screams out for an evolutionary, biological, or neurological explanation. In human history, we just don’t find that many people in that many cultures and eras in such deep agreement about anything. That they all believe in some kind of God or gods and the afterlife, and that they spend their time bickering about the details, suggests that the rudiments of belief belong to something much more basic than our higher, rationalistic intellects. I am not arguing that rational autonomy is altogether impossible, although I think for many people concerning many beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, it is. But what is becoming clear as science allows us to understand ourselves better, including the deepest, most private parts of our minds, is that achieving rational autonomy is much, much harder than we assumed for centuries. And one of the lessons here is that achieving intellectual discipline and freedom has to be a higher priority in your mental life than adherence to an ideology. Being an atheist or a theist has to come second to being a clear, objective, careful, and diligent thinker. Otherwise it the ideology that’s believing you, not you in charge of your own mind and beliefs.

2 comments:

Nice post. I think you have a sketch of a very powerful argument here. Though you need to be careful that it doesn't come back to haunt you.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent Philosophy (post 1950) concerning the capacity of our rational enterprises and the fallibility of our heuristic devises when it comes to generating beliefs. Much of this talk has been born from revelations in psychology and neuroscience and has drastically altered what is known in philosophy as Normativity. Your post highlights these developments in a such a way as to bring it to bear on the god discussion, and rightly so. It is high time that "the god urge" is made the direct object of our investigation.

However by brining in to question our methods of reasoning and modes of doxastic generation, particularly reasoning about god, you run the risk of pulling the rug from beneath our feet. By pointing out the flaws in our rational capacity you weaken our only method of evaluation. Calling in to question our reason, casts doubt on the question itself.

I don't think you have fallen ill of this, and I think that you can easily isolate the methods you use to evaluate beliefs from your belief generating processes, such that the failure of one will not entail a failure in the other. What we really need is a robust empirical inquiry in to the impact that the "god urge" has on our doxastic structures. To what extent, if any, does it affect our reasoning, and to what extent does it affect our beliefs. Should it only be affectatious on the latter then a remedy should be available. However should it influence the former we will find ourselves in quite the quandary.

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.